Читать книгу The Panama Canal: An Informal History of Its Concept, Building, and Present Status - Donald Barr Chidsey - Страница 5

Chapter

2

Early Fumblings

The briefest peek at history is enough to dispel the notion, widespread among norteamericanos, that the United States originated, as it carried through, the idea of a trans-continental canal at Panama.

The canal, indeed, was a dream that existed and strongly moved men some centuries before the United States of America was born.

Putting aside Leif Ericson, the somewhat shadowy claims for Thorfinn Karlsefni, Didrick Pining, Hans Porthorst, Johannes Scolvus (who might have been Jan Szkolony, a Pole), and the possible Prince Madoc from Wales, it is Christopher Columbus himself, the old Admiral of the Ocean Sea, who remains the discoverer if not of North America, then at least of the Caribbean islands and South America. On his third voyage to the New World, in 1499, he touched the mainland of South America near the island we know as Trinidad, and from there he coasted westward, discovering a bay he called Bastimentos. On his fourth voyage he also explored that coast, though this time from the north down. He was seeking an opening. He believed, as virtually everybody else did at that time, that the world was round, but small. He had no idea of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. These tropical shores he met with were to him mere islands, interesting enough in themselves but blocking his passage to the place he really wished to reach—Cathay, China, the Orient. Impatiently he sought a strait, a way through.

Later that year, two experienced pilots, both of whom had served under the master, picked up and rather more closely examined that same Isthmus of Darien. Their voyage is of moment chiefly because their passenger, the learned Amerigo Vespucci, more or less by accident managed to give his name, as America, to the whole of the New World. Vespucci contributed nothing else.

Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1500-1501 was probably the first explorer to see the mouth of the Chagres River; but he found no connecting waterway.

Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the best of the conquistadores, a man who entertained the highly un-Spanish belief that it was better to deal kindly with the Indians than to slaughter them out of hand.3 It was he who first crossed the isthmus and who, on September 25, 1513, was the first white man to gaze upon the Pacific, which he called the Great South Sea; it was he too who first heard of the fabulously rich lands to the south, Peru. Had he lived a little longer, this period of history might have been much less bloody and much more edifying; but he was unfortunate in his political enemies, and his head, together with the heads of five of his associates, was lopped off in public.

Six years after that a Portuguese, Magellan, working for the king of Spain, at last did find a passage between the two great oceans. This, however, was so far to the south, so tortuous and turbulent, that it was impractical.4 It was Magellan who named the newly found sea the Pacific. After what he had just been through anything would have seemed pacific.

Vasco Nuñez De Balboa

The widower king of Spain, Ferdinand, died January 23, 1516, and was succeeded by his grandson Charles. Charles V, who soon afterward was to become as well the Holy Roman Emperor, was interested in the possibility of a passage between the seas. When a hitherto unknown subject, Hernando Cortes, conquered all Mexico, then known as New Spain, Charles instructed him to seek diligently for such a strait, and if he failed to find one to consider the possibility of digging a canal. It was a lieutenant of Cortes, Alvaro Saavedra, who drew up the first plan for a Venta de Cruces-Panama canal at the next-to-narrowest part of the whole isthmus; but nothing came of this.

The search was not confined to the Atlantic side. In 1522 one Gil Gonzáles Dávila crossed the mountains from the Gulf of Nicoya and discovered Lake Nicaragua. (Incidentally, on that same trip he converted to Christianity 32,000 Indians, or so he said.) The natives there told him that from the eastern end of that lake there fell into the Atlantic a great river; and he duly reported this to his superiors. It was in this way that the Nicaraguan scheme was started. Most of the early and many or most of the later explorers favored the Nicaraguan route over that of Panama. It would have been longer, but lower: It is the lowest point in the whole chain of mountains that stretches from the Arctic to Patagonia. The lake in the middle—101 miles long, and the largest body of fresh water between the Great Lakes and Lake Titicaca, which lies between Bolivia and Peru—would of course have helped immeasurably.

There were others. There was the “waist” of Mexico, Tehuantepec. The distance across this isthmus was greater than that across any of the others, but the land was generally flatter, the rivers more docile, the climate less poisonous. Cortes had looked into this possibility early in his career, and the government of the Republic of Mexico, when it came into being, was assiduous in its examination. Again, nothing resulted.

There was the Darien route across Panama, the route Balboa had taken, which was slightly shorter than the Chagres-Venta de Cruces route, but much more rugged, and higher.

There was the Atrato River route in Continental Colombia, near the Isthmus of Panama. This stream falls into the Gulf of Darien, and its upper waters are only a few miles from another fair-sized stream that goes west into the Pacific. Rumor had it for many years that the transoceanic canal already had come into existence at this point, where a missionary had persuaded the natives to dig a ditch connecting the two rivers, a ditch that in the rainy season would be filled with water enough to float a canoe. No proof of this has been found, and even the name of the enterprising missionary is missing. The route still remains a possibility.

As early as 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian employed by Francis I of France, while cruising the Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States, missed the opening of Chesapeake Bay. He did, however, land on the eastern shore of Maryland, and marched across the peninsula to the bay, which he thought was the Indian Ocean, and which he claimed for France. A little later, still looking for the strait sought by all the world, Verrazano sailed north to what might have been, from his description, the entrance to New York Bay.5 This was more than eighty years before the arrival on that scene of Henry Hudson.

Charles V had been succeeded by his son Philip II, who reigned for a long while. Philip in 1567 sent an Italian engineer, Juan Bautista Antonelli, to Nicaragua for a good look around. Antonelli reported back that the difficulties were too great to make the building of a canal practical; and that was the end of that.

Historians generally have remarked that Philip II was opposed to the idea of an interoceanic canal on the ground that if God had wanted there to be a water route at this place He would have created it Himself, so an artificial passage would be a sacrilege. This is possible, though not an established fact; for Philip was a fanatic. It was he who ruled Spain at the height of the Inquisition, which he encouraged, and he who sent out the Armada that was as much religious in purpose as it was imperialistic.

Yet there were other reasons why he might have abstained. Spain was failing. Her hour of supreme greatness had passed. She sank, slowly. The treasures she was ripping out of Mexico and out of Peru supported the enormous armies with which she was seeking to enslave Europe, but at the same time they constituted a glittering temptation to certain Dutch, French, and English mariners who were not overburdened with scruples and whose motto was “No peace below the line,” by which they meant not the Equator, nor yet the line the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, drew to divide the world between Portugal and Spain, but rather the 30th meridian of west longitude, which was popularly taken to mark the boundary between the Old and the New worlds, and beyond which, in the opinion of these dedicated ruffians, it was always open season for Spaniards.

They were asking in the court at Madrid: Would such a canal, even if it could be built, benefit Spain rather more than Spain’s enemies? Might it not serve to break Spain s grip upon the American colonies, which she was striving so desperately to keep?

Two great treasure fleets sailed to America from Spain every year, and they were heavily guarded by warships. One went to San Juan de Ulloa, the port of Vera Cruz, to fetch away the Mexican riches, chiefly silver, while the other went first to Cartagena, then to Nombre de Dios, a miserable village on the same Bay of Bastimentos that Columbus had discovered, where the treasures from Peru were heaped.

Nombre de Dios marked the Atlantic end, the northern end, of the grandly named Camino Real, or Royal Road. This was a miserably narrow path hacked through the jungle, only partly paved, crisscrossed with liana, swarming with mosquitoes, crawling with snakes. It was about fifty miles long, and the trip took four days.

Another feature of the Camino Real that made it such a dangerous trip was the Cimarrones. These were escaped Negro slaves who had intermingled with the wild Indians to produce an extraordinarily hardy, elusive, bloodthirsty people, people who flitted through the jungle like wraiths to strike like rattlers and then be instantly and mysteriously gone again. The Cimarrones did not like the Spaniards. They were disgusted with the insatiable Spanish thirst for gold; and when they did succeed in capturing a Spaniard alive, they often gave him more gold than he wanted by pouring it, molten, down his throat.

The Camino Real, mucky though it was, was the only piece of land over which the treasure from Peru passed each year on its way to Spain; all the rest of the distance was by sea. Largely because of the Cimarrones (though a little later also because of the French and English pirates and buccaneers), this treasure was moved in recuas, or droves, of 50 to 70 mules each, all heavily laden and guarded by soldiers. There was more money here, in one of those recuas—and a whole treasure drive might consist of six or seven of them—than there was in any other place in the world.6

At the head of navigation of the Chagres River there was established a fleabitten little settlement named Venta de Cruces, and here the soldiers and the mule drivers could rest a bit, the goods they guarded being stored in warehouses to await the arrival of canoes so that the latter part of the trip could be made by water. The treasure trains, however, because of winds over the Atlantic, customarily moved early in the year, and this was the dry season: from January through April there was not enough water in the upper Chagres to float even a small unloaded canoe, and so the treasure mules had to plod the whole distance.

Francis Drake, a whirlwind, after making friends with the Cimarrones, hit this line hard, far across on the Southern shore of the isthmus, outside Panama, from which a recua had just emerged, but he got little for his pains except glory, of which he always had an imperishable portion any-way. Twice he hit Nombre de Dios, once by land and once by sea, each time while the town was waiting for the fleet; but he could not carry off much of his booty.

Warned, the Spaniards shifted their Atlantic terminal of the Camino Real farther westward along the coast, quitting Nombre de Dios, which had a shallow bay and always would have been hard to defend, and establishing a new village at Porto Bello, which they fortified. This made little difference to Henry Morgan, who struck and reduced the two forts of Porto Bello, and then with his raggle-taggle buccaneers crossed the isthmus to take the city of Panama. Morgan controlled a large and very noisy force, and there was no question of employing surprise tactics, as the out-numbered Drake had done. The Panamanians were granted time to hide their valuables, many of them in the surrounding countryside. Morgan and his men had a means of meeting this Situation. They rounded up the inhabitants and used various methods—fastening a linen band around the forehead and tightening this as a tourniquet until the eyes popped out was their favorite—to cause them to divulge their secrets. Large numbers ungratefully died under such questioning. After a few days of ferocious occupation the city was burned to the ground—each side blamed the other for starting the fire, which could have been an accident—and Morgan and his cutthroats, having stripped the town clean anyway, withdrew.

Henry Morgan

The original village of Panama—the name meant “place of fish”—had been no more than that, though the king chartered it as a city. After Morgan’s pestilential horde had departed, it was given up entirely, and a new city, destined to become much larger, was built a few miles down the coast.7

The buccaneers and the pirates did not cease to harass the Camino Real because they suffered a change of heart but only because the pickings came to be so small. Spain indubitably was fading. She would be lucky even to hold on to what she had, as everybody knew. In her trembling, weakening grasp, Panama relapsed into innocuous desuetude, as did Nicaragua and Tehuantepec and all the other possible canal sites.

The next organized effort to do something constructive about the Isthmus of Panama came, unexpectedly, from Scotland.

The Scots usually had too much trouble scraping a living out of their own beautiful but unproductive land even to think of planting colonies elsewhere. There had been such a colony at Cupid’s Cove, Newfoundland, in 1611, but it did not last long. Sir William Alexander (later the Earl of Stirling) tried to settle the land he called Nova Scotia, but only the name stuck—and for many years the French persisted in calling it Acadia, anyway. That had been in 1621, just a year after the Pilgrims, all English, had landed at Plymouth.

William Paterson was a farmer’s son and a financial genius. He is known to have spent some time in the West Indies, probably Jamaica, but he had never visited Panama or any other part of Central America. There was a report that he had at one time been mixed up in the activities of the buccaneers, who made Jamaica their base in the middle of the seventeenth Century, but this is not likely, for he was a man of high moral Standards and a man moreover who did not need to stoop to violence in Order to make money. He is first heard of, for sure, in London, where he organized the Bank of England. He was one of the original directors of that bank.

Almost no description of William Paterson survives, and the only portrait is so formalized as to be useless for any but decorative purposes, but it is clear at least that in many respects he was ahead of his time, a forward-looking man. The Bank of England had been his own idea, and he had set it up virtually unassisted. Though a Scot, he did not drink. He believed in freedom of religion, and he deplored slavery. He believed, too, in free trade, a heretical doctrine at that time. He had faith in the future of his fellowmen.

There was, however, one bee in this man’s bonnet. He was in love with Panama, and specifically with that portion of the isthmus known as Darien, the place at which Balboa had crossed. It was only a spot on the map to him, but an ideal spot. He called it, in the prospectus he drew up, “the key of the Indies and door of the world,” and also “this door of the seas, and the key of the universe.” He did not propose a canal, and only implied the construction of an interoceanic highway, but he firmly believed that the people who guarded this gateway would be the pivotal people of the world. Everything would go through these people, he argued. Theirs would be the most important international mart, even more important than Constantinople had been. They would trade in everything, making fortunes. He was not thinking of war or conquest, only of trade. It did not seem to have occurred to him that Spain, notoriously jealous of her New World claims, would object to the establishment of such a market.

Others objected as well. When he raised the subject in London, Paterson found himself opposed by the East India Company, for, grandiose as his idea was, he had spoken as well of India, suggesting that the Darien colony and trading post would not be limited to deals in the Caribbean area. The Company put pressure upon the king, who in consequence frowned upon Paterson’s proposal.

The king was William III, a Dutchman brought in when the Roman Catholic Stuarts were kicked out. He did not have a drop of Stuart blood in his veins, but he was married to a Stuart, Mary, and this had to do. He was undeniably a Protestant.

William III was king not only of England but of Scotland as well. But these were separate principalities, separately ruled. There had been a growing movement to bring them together, with one parliament, one cabinet, a movement to which William Paterson liberally contributed; but at this time they were still separate.

Paterson went to the Continent, but in Hamburg as in Amsterdam he found himself opposed by the Dutch East India Company, an exceedingly powerful organization, and he could raise no funds.

Baffled, he turned to his own native land.

It might have been supposed that Scotland was the worst place in all the world in which to finance a far-off colony, but William Paterson was used to doing the impossible. In short order he had signed up 1,400 subscribers, eight of them for £3,000 each, 640 for £100 each; the average was £285. Earls and artisans alike came in. Nobody knew where this mysterious colony was about to be planted, and nobody knew why—it was not until after the sailing, with sealed Orders, that the organization was given the name of the Darien Company—but everybody seethed with excitement, expecting to make millions. The warehouse in Miln Square, Edinburgh, soon was filled to overflowing.

The Bank of Scotland had a monopoly, and the Bank of Scotland was leery of the Paterson plan, Standing off. This did not faze Paterson, who called his financial Setup not a bank but a “fund of credit,” which worked just as well.

Paterson himself trusted too far a private banker, a man named Smyth who absconded with a large sum of the fund-of-credit s cash; and for this, though nobody thought that he was in any way dishonest, Paterson was ruled off the board of directors. Still full of zeal, he stuck to the enterprise as an unpaid volunteer.

Sixty military officers thrown out of work by the Peace of Ryswick signed on, as did hundreds of others, many of them good-for-nothings. When at last the expedition got under way in the early spring of 1699, scores of would-be stowaways had to be hauled out of the holds and dumped upon the beach.

A special flag had been designed, and this was flown. It showed a gold sun rising out of a blue sea against a red sky. A grant of arms was made to the Company, with this same design, to which had been added the motto cua panditur orbis vis unita fortior and supporters consisting of one naked and very dark man, presumably representing Africa, and one equally naked but not so dark, who might have been taken to stand for either America or East India.

Scotland had no shipyard, and English dealers had been forbidden to sell the Darien Company any kind of vessel, so three large ships besides two smaller vessels (a pink and a snow) had been purchased on the Continent. None of them was in very good condition. The Scots, un-like the English, were not wise in the ways of the sea.

The stores, the goods with which these starry-eyed men planned to Start their trade, were amazing. They included 4,000 pairs of men’s coarse stockings and 2,000 pairs of women’s; 1,500 pairs of slippers; between 5,000 and 6,000 pairs of heavy shoes, presumably for the Indians, who didn’t wear shoes or much else; 4,000 wigs; 1,500 English Bibles.

There was a serious shortage of food supplies, yet when the West Indies were reached the settlers were shocked to learn that they could not restock, even though they offered cash, because the Dutch and the English had instructed their traders in those parts to have nothing to do with the venture.

On the other hand, there was a great deal of beer and even more of French brandy. (The consumption of usquebaugh, that fiery potion the name of which was later to be shortened to whisky, at this time was largely confined to the Highlands, and the Darien venture was a Lowlands enterprise.)

They made the shore of Darien somehow, and they picked a place they called Caledonia Bay, where they built a fort and town that they named, of course, New Edinburgh. They were in a state of near-anarchy. The charter under which they found themselves operating provided that a council of seven should rule them, one member of this body being in supreme command for a week at a time only. Since the councillors all hated one another, this meant that every week all the previous regulations were rescinded and a whole new batch was imposed. William Paterson was not a member of the council.

There was no trade. There was never any. The Indians were friendly enough, but they had no need for the stockings, the shoes, the wigs.

There was a great deal of drunkenness. There were three slab-sided Presbyterian ministers who shook sad heads, deploring everything, but there was no physician. On shipboard scurvy had reigned; on land it was malaria, cholera, and yellow fever. Of that first party, numbering 1,200, 744 died, and only a handful ever got back to Scotland in one of the five vessels, late in November of 1699.

Meanwhile a second Company, not having heard of the evacuation of New Edinburgh, had started forth. It numbered 1,300, and it met with the same fate as the first, a fate in this case hurried by the Spaniards from Porto Bello, who descended upon the little settlement in overwhelming numbers. The Spanish commander, himself threatened with a mutiny, for his men too were dying like flies, gave the intrepid settlers good terms: they could depart with their golden-sun-on-a-blue-sea flag flying and they could even keep many of their small arms. Some few of these persons reached the mainland of North America, and fewer still actually got back to Scotland, though they would never be the same again. Most of them were stranded in the West Indies, where wages were minuscule and white men not wanted.

There was even a third sailing, but this one, after gazing upon the ruins of the fort, over which a Spanish flag flew, wisely turned back.

The whole thing had been an unmitigated mishap. It had cost optimistic Scots £-300,000, a national calamity, and there was nothing to show for it but an appalling batch of obituaries.

There was also left a great deal of hard feeling, for the shocked Scots blamed England for the failure, and believed that they had been tricked, an attitude that delayed the union of the two kingdoms (a union that had been imminent) for another eight years.

And darkness and decay, the snakes and the mosquitoes, together with a soggy silence, once again took over the key of the universe.

All that remained—and still remains—is two place-names, Caledonia Bay and Punta Escoces, or Point of the Scots.